BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

06/01/2009

Iron curtain's shadow hangs over Belarus theatre troupe

Matthew Clayfield

THEY perform in secret, in private apartments and forests, with the threat of a police raid or arrest hanging over each performance.

But members of the Belarus Free Theatre, in Australia for the Sydney Festival, claim their performances are worth the risk to support freedom of speech.

As residents of a country where Soviet-style repression and censorship have never gone out of fashion, the writers, actors and directors who comprise the group staunchly believe in fighting for an open society.

The Free Theatre was founded in 2005 by playwright and former journalist Nikolai Khalezin and human rights activist Natalya Kolyada.

Speaking yesterday at Sydney's Belvoir Street Theatre, where the group's Being Harold Pinter opened last night, Khalezin said The Free Theatre had been designed to say what needed to be said, but what the Belarussian Government did not want audiences to hear.

"We were interested in looking at those dark zones in society that everyone else is silent about," Khalezin said through a translator. "We want to examine and shed light on them."

He said the decision to tour Being Harold Pinter, which combines the words of Belarussian political prisoners with excerpts from Pinter's plays and his landmark speech to the Nobel Prize committee in 2005, proved timely when the playwright died last month after his struggle with cancer. The Free Theatre will dedicate the Australian season of the show to Pinter, who saw the play in 2007 and became a vocal supporter of the group.

As The Free Theatre's signature work, the piece explores the themes of violence, political repression and the position of the artist in society. In many ways, it stems directly from the group's own experience in its homeland.

"When I read Pinter's plays for the first time, they spoke louder tome than most contemporary Belarussian writing," Khalezin said. "It almost felt as though he was writing about the Belarussian situation. This is because the themes of violence and repression are international."

The Free Theatre has found it difficult to be an "underground theatre group" while receiving five-star reviews in Britain's The Guardian and travelling to international arts festivals.

But international recognition -- including the support of luminaries such as British playwright Tom Stoppard, the group's patron, Czech writer and politician Vaclav Havel, and Pinter -- has served as a kind of insurance policy. If any of the troupe were to be arrested or detained -- something that has happened to all of them -- their plight would ensure unwanted attention on the Belarussian Government.

As the group's international stature grows, its standing in Belarus becomes more stable. And this will allow it to pursue, with increasing determination, what Pinter said in his Nobel lecture was "so nearly lost to us: the dignity of man".

Source:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24881989-15089,00.html

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